David Mizner has written a diary I recommend to all supporters of Barack Obama. It highlights behavior that inadvertently harms Obama’s campaign by driving away some Democrats who otherwise lean toward him.

Mizner was an active supporter of John Edwards for president, as his diary history shows. Like me, he wrote regular front-page posts advocating for Edwards at MyDD. But after Edwards dropped out, Mizner voted for Obama in the New York primary on February 5.

On its surface, Mizner’s latest piece is an inside-baseball critique of editorial bias at the Daily Kos. He demonstrates how Markos Moulitsas has in recent months become an uncritical cheerleader for Obama, after being skeptical toward all the Democratic candidates in 2007.

But I recommend this diary not because you should care about what some blogger thinks of Markos. Rather, I think Mizner has touched on the alienation many Democrats feel when they encounter the overheated Hillary-hating and Obama-loving rhetoric from Obama fans:

It’s no coincidence that in the last two months the site has devolved into a propaganda organ for the Obama campaign. Although it’s aggravating to come across Drudgery at the top of the rec list and casual claims that Hillary is a sociopath, it’s not the nastiness that’s worrisome (freedom is untidy); it’s the laziness, the unquestioning partisanship, the lack of brainwork. These days at Daily Kos there’s no exchange of ideas, no debate. Obama is good, Hillary is bad, case closed.

It’s probably not wise to go looking to Daily Kos or any other political blog for Truth, but the progressive blogosphere fancies itself the reality-based community, and that commodity is in short supply at the mothership. If you’re a progressive untouched by enthusiasm for Obama or hatred for Hillary, you must be wondering what race Kossacks are watching. In the race I’ve watched, Obama has not campaigned as a transformative progressive. In the race I’ve watched, he has failed to offer a single bold policy initiative, coddled a virulent homophobe for political purposes, voted to fund the war in Iraq and justified doing so by parroting a disgusting rightwing talking point, echoed the GOP claim that the Social Security system is in crisis, refused to join Edwards in opposing the Global War on Terror framework, joined George Bush in seeking to expand the size of the military by 92,000 troops, said he would increase the military budget, supported corporate free trade, enlisted Tom Daschle to assemble a base of support on K-Street, raised buckets of cash fromlobbyist-law firms, and bashed unions for helping Edwards until he himself was the beneficiary of labor’s largesse. Et Cetera.

A dozen links in that passage didn’t come through when I copied and pasted, but click to the original diary and you’ll see that Mizner has the links to back up what he is saying.

This passage also made a crucial point that Obama supporters rarely acknowledge:

I’m not going to defend the Clinton campaign’s race-baiting or its praising of McCain at Obama’s expense. Nor, though, will I defend the Obama’s campaign sexism, or its willingness to claim race-baiting where there is none. I believe history will show both that the Clnton campaign wanted to turn Barack into the “black candidate” and that the Obama campaign wanted to turn Hillary into the racist candidate. They both exploited racial resentment.

Several links in that paragraph didn’t come through. The most important one is to the memo that the Obama campaign distributed in South Carolina, which sought to portray the Clintons as using racially divisive rhetoric. That memo was designed to give Obama an edge among blacks and white liberals, and it worked, but it also distorted Hillary’s comments about Lyndon Johnson and Bill’s comments about the “fairy tale.”

My impression is that intense Obama supporters can’t understand why everyone isn’t as outraged as they are over the latest stupid comment by some Clinton supporter. First, the Obama campaign has crossed lines too, as Mizner points out. Second, many progressives have, according to Mizner,

abdicated the job of trying to hold Obama accountable. Both Move On and Blue Majority gave him endorsements without offering so much as constructive criticism. Kos himself hasn’t written one word critical of Obama in several weeks, during which time Obama has sent nothing but alarming signals on the sphere’s signature issue: Iraq. Unlike Hillary, he wouldn’t ban corporate mercenaries and his advisors are describing his modest withdrawal plan as a “best case scenario” and calling for a large residual force. Also unmentioned by Kos and the other Daily Kos front page bloggers is Obama’s attempt to denythat he once held certain liberal positions.

Again, the links did not come through, but you can find many in the diary.

When Obama puts up red flags, and onetime reasonable progressives have nothing but praise for him and condemnation for Hillary, it turns off a lot of Democrats.

Speaking of the devolution of political discourse lately, I can’t resist linking to a diary Mizner wrote last month: “Do You Miss Edwards Yet?” The opening paragraph was a classic:

Ah, 2007. How I long for those halcyon, pre-Ferraro days when a major issue in the primary was the dangerous influence of corporate power. Thanks to Edwards, the Big Three battled over who would be more willing and able to take on corporations. There was reason to doubt that the policies proposed by Obama and Clinton–and even by Edwards, perhaps–would deliver the bold change they promised, but at least the issue of corporate power was front and center. Now, though, with Edwards gone, the issue is barely an issue, and somewhere CEOs and Wall Street execs are laughing.

Ain’t that the truth.